Artists in the Photo League, active from 1936 to 1951, were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life. Their focus centered on New York City and its vibrant streets—a newsboy at work, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island. Though beautiful, the images harbor strong social commentary on issues of class, child labor, and opportunity. The Radical Camera explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League, tracing the group's left-leaning roots and idealism to the worker-photography movement in Europe. Influenced by mentors Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, and Paul Strand, artists in the Photo League worked within a unique complex comprising a school, a darkroom, a gallery, and a salon, in which photography was discussed as both a means for social change and an art form. The influence of the Photo League artists on modern photography was enormous, ushering in the New York School.
Presenting 150 works of the members of the Photo League alongside complementary essays that offer new interpretations of the League's work, ideas, and pedagogy, this beautifully illustrated book features artists including Margaret Bourke-White, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Lisette Model, Ruth Orkin, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, and Weegee, among many others.
Charcoal Press is pleased to announce The Locusts, the first major monograph by photographer and publisher Jesse Lenz. After a few years of living and traveling North American in an airstream with his family, Lenz settled down in a farm in rural Ohio. He began photographing his children as they ran wild in fields, built forts in the attic, and fell asleep surrounded by lightsabers and superheroes.
Inspired by the Polaroid SX-70 instant photographs taken by the great Greek American artist, Lucas Samaras, the well-known photographer Harvey Stein, in the mid 1970's bought an SX-70 camera and for the rest of that decade used it to shoot in his signature style, intimate portraits of strangers in the street. This in addition to his major work of street photography in which he simultaneously confronts and collaborates with strangers using his two Leica M-4 film cameras.
India is a strange country. You come back without being fully aware of what you really saw. Everything that seems real is not. And everything that appears as imbued with supernatural well and truly exists. This doubtful situation is in fact the uncertainty of street photography: everything goes too fast, constantly appears and disappears in the viewfinder as visions we try to capture, following the impulses of our unconscious. Nothing is more beautiful than the apparent banality, behind which we sometimes discover another world, invisible if we don't take the time to look at it, to open our eyes to detect its mysteries and symbols that move out of the shadows into the limelight for a moment, before vanishing.
No superhero is a series of work by the acclaimed Scandinavian artist, Ole Marius Joergensen. The work features meticulously staged, cinematic photographs that depict seemingly ordinary situations which are then infused with a juxtaposed narrative. This unlocks an unexpected and unique world that feels both old and new.
Of all the firearms in the world owned by private citizens for non-military purposes, half are in the United States. Numerically they exceed the country’s population: 393 million for 372 million people. This is no coincidence, nor a matter of market alone: but of tradition and Constitutional guarantee. It is the history of the Second Amendment, ratified in 1791 to reassure the inhabitants of the newly independent territories. Two hundred and fifty years later, it is still entrenched in all aspects of American life. This book frames its current status through what are seen as four fundamental American values: Family, Freedom, Passion, Style.
LOVING. A Photographic History of Men in Love portrays romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken during the 100-year period between the 1850s and 1950s. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos made in the most varied of contexts, both private and public. Some are formal studio portraits, others were shot at the beach, in suburban settings, in the countryside, and at home. The range of individuals shown is extensive, covering nineteenth-century working class men, fashionably dressed businessmen, university students, and soldiers and sailors of all ages-spanning the time between the Civil War and World War War II, and into the 1950s.
Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West illuminate his profound connection with the region and its people. His finely detailed images shine with an authenticity that reveals the ties between identity, place, and the act of perceiving. For Varjabedian, photography is a receptive process driven by openness to the revelation each subject offers, rather than by the desire to manipulate form or to catalog detail. He achieves this vision by capturing and suspending on film those decisive moments in which the elements and the spirit of a moment come together
Phil Bergerson "In Search of Meaning" marks the Stephen Bulger Gallery's sixth solo exhibition of work by Canadian photographer Phil Bergerson (b. 1947, Toronto, Canada) and coincides with the release of his third monograph, A Retrospective, published by Daylight Books. The publication is a survey of Bergerson's illustrious 50-year career which began in the 1970s with his exploration of performance art, drawing, painting and printmaking, before embracing photography exclusively. His early imagery includes an investigation of vernacular photography by manipulating found family snapshots to imbue them with new meanings, and the creation of grid-based works presenting multiple images that comment on the excesses of consumer culture.
This amazing compendium of photographs celebrating the Golden State is truly a love letter to California. One hundred and ten photographers offer intriguing photographs and perspectives on our special sliver of the west coast. At a time of Covid, wildfires, earthquakes, and protest, there is comfort in our deep connectedness to place.
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